Mostly we code...sometimes we write. Every once in a while, we podcast.

Last November, I was able to celebrate surviving 45 years on this planet. At that time, I decided it was time for my mid life crisis - all the cool kids have mid life crises. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, asking everyone I know "what are you planning for your mid life crisis?" Of course, I love my wife and family dearly, and she is opposed to the whole mistress thing. I also have a fondness for practical cars, so that kills the sportscar cliche. And I think I'd chicken out if I ever had to try to jump out of an airplane.

So if I want to be trendy, my only option is to mess around with my job. After all, I've spent over 16 years running CodeWeavers; if you add in my previous company, I've spent more than half my life running a company of one sort or another. The problem is, I dearly love my employer. This is by far the best place I've ever worked. The staff is fantastic; the work is challenging and important. The work environment is fun and relaxed, but still geared towards productivity. In fact, it's almost as though I had absolute power and could shape the work environment to be exactly the way I like it. Further, we just got a fantastic new coffee pot. So I can't leave now.

But perhaps I can change my role. I've become a bit burnt out on my current job; I find myself shorter of temper and often frustrated. I often don't have the same zeal for the work day that I have largely enjoyed throughout my career.

By way of history, I started life as a programmer. I was proud of my acumen and speed; one of the great joys of my life was being the underage hot shot C programmer at my first job, back when C was cool, hip and new. I love the technical challenge; immersing myself in technical problems, and puzzling out the best way forward. However, sometime between that hot shot young programmer and now, I found myself drawn into managing things. I couldn't stomach the way other people ran things, so I ended up taking on more and more responsibility. So now instead of figuring out hard technical challenges, I find myself deciding which coffee filter to buy and where we're going to go for lunch.

So I've been experimenting, trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I recently took a sabbatical from my CEO duties and buried myself in pure coding. The result was a shiny new html5 client for the SPICE project, and a great deal of fun for me. I'm going to continue down that path a bit; burying myself more in technical duties, and trying to shift many of my responsibilities to others at CodeWeavers. Of course, this is hard transistion to make; I may find it hard to persuade others to figure out the lunch plans, after all 😊.